December 6, 2016

Jeopardy! plows through two new contestants every weeknight, as implacably as a shark. But that means your odds, as a random American, of getting on the show this year are still no better than 1 in 800,000. Sad!

Enter FleetWit! It’s a mobile “brain race” site where players compete in live quizzes testing a mix of trivia know-how and general mental agility. I’ve tried a few of FleetWit’s race over the past month and always enjoy them…they’re fast-paced, accessible, well-designed. Real-time gaming seems to be the Next Big Trivia Thing, and FleetWit is the digital platform that comes closest so far to capturing the real-time thrills of playing on a game show…partly because they actually award cash prizes to top finishers! (No Rice-a-Roni or copies of the home game for runners-up, however.)

I’ve been consulting with FleetWit on trivia content and designing special “Genius Questions” for their site on occasion. But this weekend we’re going to try something a little different: I’m going to compete in a live race on Sunday at 8:30pm EST against anyone who’s up to the challenge. It’s free to enter and more than bragging rights are on the line: there’s $1500 in prizes up for grabs, plus a $25 bonus for anyone that can beat me! You can sign up here.

If you haven’t checked out FleetWit yet, you might want to get a few practice races under your belt before Sunday night’s big event. I’ll see you at the races!

Posted by Ken at 2:00 am

December 5, 2016

Jeopardy! is running a series of stories this season called “the J!Effect,” about how the quiz show has changed lives over its 30-year-plus run. This is very exciting to hear because it means Jeopardy! is embracing the hip millennial-friendly abbreviation “J!” for its brand, replacing its ’90 attempt, “Jep!”

But it’s also exciting because it means the show checked in with me, to see how my eye-bags and jowls are getting on now that my streak on the show is more than twelve years in the rear-view mirror!

There are more excerpts from the interview here. My joke about how you have to win for six months on a quiz show to afford a house in Seattle these days was a big deal locally, by the way, making the Times and nightly newscasts. For the record: it was just a joke! You can still buy a fixer-upper in Seattle with a 20-game streak, easy.

November 9, 2016

I just got back from the first ever Quiz Olympiad, organized by the International Quizzing Association and held in the Olympic cradle of Athens, Greece. It was an historic weekend!

Some background: the IQA has been holding these European and international quiz tournaments for many years, but I’ve only attended one: the 2007 European Quiz Championships in Blackpool, England. That event was held in a cheerfully rundown Basil Fawlty-style holiday hotel on a chilly November weekend, but we were warmly welcomed by our British hosts. I was completely charmed by the international flavor of the proceedings and the bewildering difficulty of much of the material.

The 2016 Quiz Olympiad, by contrast, was held in an upscale five-star hotel in central Athens, and was attended by over two hundred competitors from all over the world. Twenty nations were registered in the flagship event, the international teams quiz. I was there as the captain of Team USA, which brought over our largest-ever complement of sixteen players. Some were quiz show champs you might recognize from TV: Ed Toutant and Dave Legler, seven-figure winners on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; Brandon Saunders from Million Second Quiz;Jeopardy! college champion Shane Whitlock; and Raj Dhuwalia, the all-time winner on GSN’s The Chase. Others, like Mark Ryder and Tim Polley, were just mild-mannered civilians who play IQA events remotely from the States, but are every bit as good as the names you know.

Here’s the thing to know about top-level European quiz: it’s an uphill climb for Americans. Our trivia canon privileges domestic history and culture to such a degree that it can be a shock to the American system when we’re suddenly expected to have an equal familiarity with Uzbek road cycling, Croatian medieval history, contemporary Iranian poetry, Cameroonian jazz-funk, and Monegasque oceanography (all actual examples from the Olympiad, by the way). The specialty quiz on history had maybe five questions out of fifty that covered American history, roughly the same distribution given over to the Scandinavians or the Balkans. Don’t get me wrong, this is the canon that makes sense for a mostly European field! But for America ever to really compete, we’re going to have to suck it up and watch some soccer or something.

Still, Team USA acquitted itself well. We only finished in the middle of the pack on the team quiz, but then two of us medaled in the specialist quizzes the next day (Brandon Saunders’s bronze in Digital Technology and my silver in Film). Shane took third in the knockout quiz, and Brandon and Tanay Kothari were gold and bronze in the speed quiz–evidently a young person’s game. Three of the top ten finishers in the pairs quiz (including Ed Toutant’s bronze with Belgium’s Nico Pattyn) had U.S. players aboard. Maybe the most impressive feat by an American was Raj Dhuwalia’s fifth-place finish in the individual quiz, just a few questions behind England’s big names. Only England, Belgium, and Norway finished with more medals than our six. (Complete information and standings here.)

Putting on a big eight-event quiz weekend for hundreds of players in dozens of languages must be a logistical nightmare, but everything went off without a hitch, thanks to the hard work of Jane Allen and her IQA team. Events started and ended strictly on schedule, which is almost unheard of in my U.S. quiz tournaments experience. There was even down time for side trips to the Acropolis, the original 1896 Olympic stadium, and some nearby islands.

Sign me up for 2020, if I can pass the doping tests! If you think Team USA needs your skills as well, you can find out more about world quizzing events here.

Posted by Ken at 8:13 pm

October 31, 2016

I’m off to Greece this week for the inaugural Quiz Olympiad. (Cue NBC Olympics anthem! But only in your head so we don’t get sued.) Here’s the press release I just got sent about the event. Wish us luck!

Team USA competing at Quiz Olympiad, Nov. 3 – 6 in Athens, Greece

Author and Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings is captain of Quiz Team USA

Boulder CO, October 28, 2016: Author and game show champion Ken Jennings has been named captain of the American team by the USA Chapter of the International Quizzing Association (iQa). He will lead a group of 16 trivia players, academics, and other know-it-alls to take on adversaries from across the globe at the Quiz Olympiad in Athens, Greece during November 3rd – 6th, 2016.

The national team includes Shane & Lee-Ann Whitlock of Arkansas; Les Chun, Raj Dhuwalia, Julie Ghanbari, Tanay Kothari, Mark Ryder, and Kathryn Verwillow of California; David Legler of Illinois; Tim Polley of Mississippi; Chris Goheen of Pennsylvania; Jean Cui and Brandon Saunders of New York; and Ed Toutant of Texas. Ken Jennings represents the state of Washington, and Paul Bailey of Colorado is the team manager. Members of the team hold a variety of advanced academic degrees, are champions as individuals or on teams from a variety of quiz & trivia competitions, and have won a combined total of over $8 million on television game shows.

The Olympiad will see individuals and teams from 26 nations answering questions in categories including business, culture, entertainment, film, geography, history, lifestyle, literature, media, performing & visual arts, science, sport, and technology. “I always have a great time when I get to attend one of these international quizzing events, mostly because I love the idea that trivia is a noble, global pursuit. Quizzing should absolutely have its own Olympiad, with all the attendant pomp and prestige and geopolitical pressure and wild shenanigans in the ‘Olympic Village.’ I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Jennings. All Team USA members will compete in individual, pairs, and four-member squad events. The top USA squad will be Jennings, Dhuwalia, Ryder, and S. Whitlock. The top USA age 30 and under (30U) squad will be Cui, Kothari, Polley, and Saunders.

The Quiz Olympiad will be the largest and most diverse competition of its kind ever, with players from all over the world contesting titles and participating head-to-head for the first time. Since 2003, the International Quizzing Association has organized a variety of events worldwide to stimulate mental competition at the local, regional, national and international level. The next World Quizzing Championships take place at over 200 locations across the globe including 20+ locations in the USA on Saturday, June 2, 2017 (see www.worldquizzing.com). The next Trivia Championships of North America (TCONA) take place August 4-6, 2017 in Las Vegas, NV (see www.tcona.com).

October 24, 2016

In this week’s Maphead piece for Condé Nast Traveler, I write about the weird history of Westwego, Louisiana, which bills itself as the only town in America whose name is a complete sentence.

I was unable to find any other burg making a similar claim, so I let it slide. But then, checking out Westwego in a road atlas, I noticed a possible competing claim just on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain: Uneedus, Louisiana. (Sure enough, the history checks out. Uneedus comes from “You need us,” the slogan of a nearby lumber company.)

If there was another candidate just a few parishes north, I’m now skeptical that the rest of the national map is entirely bereft of complete sentence towns. Just because I couldn’t find Let’s Dance, Oregon or God Saves, Arkansas in any gazetteer doesn’t mean they (or, more likely, similar examples) don’t exist.

So let’s crowdsource this. Does anyone know of any American toponyms that are complete sentences? They have to originate as a complete sentence, not just grammatically resemble one. “Wichita Falls” doesn’t count.

Posted by Ken at 10:58 am

October 11, 2016

Way back in 2014, when gay marriage was illegal in half the country, True Detective and the iPhone 6 were brand new, and Donald Trump was still just a reality TV punchline, my friend Paul Bailey asked if I might want to represent my country in the first “Quiz Olympiad,” an international quizzing championship scheduled for the end of 2016.

Sure! I said. I’ve always wanted to be an Olympian, and my best pole vaulting years are probably behind me.

Fast-forward to 2016 and IT’S ALL HAPPENING! Teams from four continents are headed to Athens, Greece in less than a month to compete in the International Quizzing Association’s very first “Quiz Olympiad.” Joining me on Team USA are some of the best American quizzers I know, including some you might recognize from their big wins on Jeopardy! (Shane Whitlock) or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (Ed Toutant).

I’ve only been to one of these European quiz tournaments before, and it was a daunting challenge. But Team USA is ready to answer the call. My shirt even showed up in the mail today!

Paul Bailey notes that you can support America’s nerdiest Olympians by buying yourself a team shirt, one just like mine except it doesn’t smell like the Costco hummus I spilled on mine earlier. More details here; orders for the next run of shirts are due this week.

In November, the Quiz Olympiad website will have updates on how we’re doing against the Brits and Belgians and the other titans of international quizzing, the ‘roided-up East German swimmers of this particular Olympics. A nation’s eyes will be upon us. We won’t let you down.

Posted by Ken at 4:06 pm

September 27, 2016

In my new “Debunker” column posted today on Woot.com, I track the lineage of the bizarre trivia factoid that holds that “arachibutyrophobia” is a medical term meaning “the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.”

I can find no evidence for this in any clinical literature, but was able to track the word back to 1970s pop-reference classic The People’s Almanac. The almanac’s author, David Wallechinsky, tells me that the phobias list came from a writer named Robert Hendrickson, who assembled it from extensive research and even interviews. But the paper trail here is a set of notes that was recently donated by Wallechinsky, with the rest of his papers, to Claremont University.

Is anyone in L.A. dying to spend a day at Claremont in order to find out if those files contain the provenance of “arachibutyrophobia”? Science needs you.

Posted by Ken at 9:09 pm

September 23, 2016

Hey, here’s another thing that I never blogged about because it launched during the great summer blog drought. My friend Rob Kutner, who wrote for The Daily Show and is now at Conan, had an idea for a comedy podcast in which my silicon arch-nemesis Watson and I were forced to go on the lam after our Jeopardy! encounter, and had adventures! Watson’s giant brain, you see, is full of secrets that could bring down any number of powerful institutions. And I’m carrying him in our backpack! We’re both in big trouble from the U.S. government, hackers, Freemasons, aliens, the Build-a-Bear Workshop, and all the other shadowy forces that control the world.

My creative consultancy was pretty much limited to suggesting the title: Runaway Brains! Like “runaway trains,” get it? It’s a pun.

I would never list “voice acting” as the top strength on my résumé, but luckily Rob talked “Weird Al” Yankovic into voicing Watson, and he’s hilarious. IBM should probably look into hiring him for the gig full-time, for the accordion chops alone. Guest stars include beloved comedy names like Mayim Bialik, Michael Ian Black, Adam Pally, David Koechner, Joshua Malina, Lauren Lapkus, and Frank De Caro.

The whole thing turned out great, and it’s a fun, quick listen. Here’s a Splitsider review backing me up on this. The first few episodes are, I believe, free from Howl. If you like ’em enough to want to hear the final fate of me and Watson, there’s a cheap one-month subscription available.

Enjoy! And watch out for the Lizard-men!

Posted by Ken at 3:02 pm

September 7, 2016

I dimly remember that I used to run word puzzles here sometimes on Wednesdays. How about this one, which came to me in the shower this morning?

There’s a certain company that introduced one of its most successful products in 1998. Take that brand name, and insert a new letter into it: a ‘p’ between the third and fourth letters. You’ll get a tagline that this company used in a popular TV ad campaign beginning in 2006.

September 6, 2016

This site, like a lazy Frenchman, took the summer off. That was partly due to some database crashes and spambot attacks that happened when I was out of town, and which I’m just getting around to fixing now. Thank you for your patience.

I write a weekly Monday column called Maphead for Condé Nast Traveller, where I (virtually) visit the world’s geographic oddities. Here’s a special bonus “Maphead” that got vetoed over the summer by Condé Nast, because the photo editor (quite reasonably!) has a “no swastikas” rule.

This blog, while definitely not pro-swastika, is willing to take them on a case-by-case basis. Here’s the geography lesson that was too edgy for Big Content!

The Zernikow Swastika

In 1992, a landscaping intern in northeastern Germany was given a boring task by his bosses: to scour aerial photographs of the region for irrigation lines. But then he came across photo 106/88, showing the Kutzerower Heath northwest of the village of Zernikow, and his jaw dropped. “Do you see what this is?” he asked his boss. Günter Reschke had just uncovered a previously unknown chapter in the history of Nazi Germany, hiding in plain sight.

A ghost of the Third Reich makes its yearly return.
The photo quite clearly showed a giant yellow swastika, 200 feet on a side, in the middle of a dense pine forest. Forester Klaus Göricke, dispatched to check out the site, found that the Nazi symbol was formed from 140 larches, planted with typical German precision. For most of the year, the trees were invisible. But for a few weeks every autumn, before the larches lost their leaves, they turned a bright yellow, in stark contrast to the surrounding evergreens.

For half a century, no one saw the forest for the trees.
From the size of the larches, Göricke deduced that they’d been planted in the late 1930s. Every year for more than half a century, a yellow swastika had faded onto the map here north of Berlin, then disappeared a few weeks later. In East Germany, low-flying private planes were forbidden, so no one had noticed. When pressed, locals remembered different stories about who had planted the trees: Was it to thank the government laborers who had worked on a street in town nearby? To disavow a local villager who’d been taken to a concentration camp for listening to the BBC? To celebrate Hitler’s birthday? Nobody is sure to this day.
It took eight years to fix the problematic landscaping.
With the swastika making worldwide headlines, the German government acted quickly, sending in local forestry workers to chainsaw the trees out of existence. They cut down forty larches, but to no avail. When fall came, the swastika was still visible, if a little ragged around the edges. Since the Brandenburg region was seeing an uptick in neo-Nazi violence at the time, this didn’t look good. On December 4, 2000, the fascist trees were hacked to bare stumps.

The Nazi trees are everywhere! Keep watching the leaves!
But the Zernikow larches were only the beginning. Armed with better imagery in the digital mapping age, Germans began finding arboreal Nazi artifacts all over. A deciduous forest in Wiesbaden was discovered to have a swastika of Douglas firs hiding in it, which emerged every winter, a sort of of reverse of the Zernikow grove. The most puzzling find was an entire swastika-shaped forest in remote Kyrgyzstan, of all places. Was the forest planted as a show of German-Russian solidarity in the days before the war? Or by German POWs a few years later? Or by some pro-Nazi nutjob during the Cold War? The mystery of the forest swastikas still has journalists…stumped.

Posted by Ken at 9:32 am

May 26, 2016

I hope this message makes it to you. My friend and I are debating how one might estimate the number of trivia questions that exist. Or more precisely, how many distinct questions could be asked to the American participants on Jeopardy or in any trivia game, where the reaction is neither “that’s too easy to be considered trivia” or “no one except an academic in that field should know X”.

We tried several different statistical arguments like how often questions repeat themselves on Jeopardy and how many things a person learns in a day versus what % of trivia questions do they know. However, neither of us are really trivia experts, and we found ourselves challenged making a reasonable back of the envelope estimate. My best guess is half a million distinct trivia questions, but I could be off by orders of magnitude.

If you find this question interesting, I’d love to hear your take on it.

Are you kidding, Anthony? I’m probably one of the six or seven people in America who would find this question interesting!

Even boiling down your question to “askable on Jeopardy!” doesn’t quite solve your definitional problems here. Jeopardy! tends to keep its material fresh by adding cosmetic second clues. Are these two the same “trivia question” or not?

The oldest subway system in continental Europe is found in this Hungarian capital city.

In 1242, this city replaced Esztergom as the capital of Hungary.

I would say yes, for these purposes: they are both restatements of “What is the capital of Hungary?” But that underlying uber-question might not always be obvious to the layperson. And there are probably much trickier edge cases.

There’s also the problem of Jeopardy! clues where the response isn’t really something that anyone KNOWS-knows, but smart players should be able to intuit. These are especially common as Daily Doubles or in Final Jeopardy…take a clue like

He was born in 1728 in Yorkshire, England and died in a skirmish February 14, 1779 in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii.

Now, the birth and death dates of [this historical figure] aren’t really knowable facts. It wouldn’t be fair game to ask “What were the birth and death dates of [Historical Figure]?” But the writers have carefully put in just enough information to trigger a well-informed guess from a smart player. I suppose you could restate all questions of this form as “What 18th-century Englishman was killed in Hawaii?” but there are endless variations, even here. Subtract the dates and add a quote from his diary. Withhold the place names but add more details about the cause of death. Are those really tests of the same fact? [Historical Figure]’s death, which took less than a minute of real time, can spawn almost endless trivia material in subtle shades of difficulty and variety.

Problems of definition aside, what is the order of magnitude here? Are there tens of thousands of facts that Jeopardy! can ask? Hundreds of thousands? Is it over a million? Thoughts?

Posted by Ken at 3:10 pm

May 3, 2016

Since 2012–almost four years!–I’ve been writing a weekly news quiz for Slate magazine. But I told Slate last month that I was giving up the assignment. Last week, for the first time ever, the Slate Quiz was written by someone else.

I was sorry to have to step away, because the quiz is always a lot of fun to write, and spending hours reading about the news every week means I’m an unusually well-informed citizen, especially about weird animal rampages and dumb criminals. Did you know that ten people tried to file their taxes from Coachella this year? That was the officially the last week I’ll know about stuff like that.

I was starting to have two problems with the quiz: I’m behind on a book, and having to spent a big chunk of every Wednesday on an unrelated deadline wasn’t helping. A news quiz can’t be written in advance, you see. Even if I was traveling or on vacation, I’d have to figure out when to research and write and file the quiz.

The other problem was, the more experience I had with the quiz, the longer it seemed to take to write! I chalk this up to perfectionism. This earthquake question is sort of boring…is there a way to make this destructive earthquake in Ecuador seem a little more, well, fun? (Without trivializing it, of course.) Is this Donald Trump joke really as funny as last week’s Donald Trump joke? You’d think I would have gotten more efficient at this, but it just seemed like I was always trying to get every question to capture some elusive perfection I may have glimpsed at one time on a past quiz.

I’m sorry if you were a fan of the quiz…it’s continuing at the moment, written collaboratively by Slate staffers, and I think they’re circling another writer they want to take over. When the book is done, maybe I’ll suddenly decide I’m bored every Wednesday afternoon and ask if Slate is hiring quizmasters, who knows. I certainly have more “Slate quizmaster” experience that any other applicant they’ll get. I like my odds.

Posted by Ken at 9:46 am

April 28, 2016

Let’s face it: the seven Junior Genius books I spent the last few years writing would have been maybe one-quarter as good without the funny, charming artwork of Mike Lowery. You know what kids don’t want? Big unbroken blocks of text about 19th-century presidents. You know what kids do want? Funny cartoons of Andrew Jackson hitting some dude over the head with a cane.

But despite our two-year collaboration, which sometimes included detailed back-and-forth on illustration ideas, Mike and had never met! I live in Seattle; he lives in Atlanta. It’s harder to get farther apart than we are and still live in the continental United States.

A couple weeks away I was invited to visit the headquarters of Mailchimp, the company that helps deliver 17,000 Tuesday Trivia e-mails for me every week. MailChimp is in Atlanta! I e-mailed Mike immediately (not with MailChimp, just the regular way) and at first he thought he was teaching a class that morning and wouldn’t be able to meet up. Ships in the night. But look who I ran into in the MailChimp elevator that morning!

Mike even sketched something quickly for me while I was talking, what a guy. Pretty lame of me to ask, I guess, since he draws for a living. That would be like him asking me to write him some trivia for free.

Larry Gelbart used to say that he never met Murray Schisgal, with whom he shared a co-writer credit on Tootsie, until they began accepting statuettes together at awards ceremonies. I’m happy that I no longer have to tell children that I’ve never met Mike! Instead I can say that he is a very nice man, and carries Chinese hotel stationery around with him for some reason.

Posted by Ken at 7:24 pm

March 21, 2016

Reading: I recommend it! In fact, I specifically recommend the books I’ve been reading recently. They are not new books. (Wait, with one exception.) Here’s the last month or so:

The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty. Did you know Welty’s first novel (well, short novel) was a Southern update of the Grimm’s fairy tale, along the lines of Joy Williams’s The Changeling, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, or Neil Gaiman’s Anything Ever Written by Neil Gaiman? I sure didn’t. Cameo guest appearance by Mike Fink.

The Intutionist by Colson Whitehead. Yes, it’s a (powerful) racial parable. But it’s also an amazing feat of urban fantasy invention, about a powerful guild of elevator inspectors and their competing philosophies of elevator inspection. A Ben Katchor strip come to life.

Patience by Daniel Clowes. I can’t honestly tell if this is his masterpiece or if I just think it is because it’s a murder mystery and a time travel story. This was virtually laboratory-engineered to be my favorite thing ever.

The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by G. K. Chesterton. I loved the Father Brown stories, but didn’t know that Dover has a bunch of thin paperbacks keeping Chesterton’s other mystery series in print–many with Martin Gardner introductions! This one features a quiet bureaucrat prone to sphinx-link contradictory utterances, each leading to a mystery. The first story in this collection was a particular favorite of Borges.

The Comedians by Kliph Nesteroff. This is now the book on 20th-century American funny business. So many great stories here, from burlesque houses up to podcast garages.

Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello. Like Dylan’s book, this is told out of order, which should be required in rock memoirs as far as I’m concerned. Not quite great enough to recommend to non-fans, but if you’ve followed Costello’s remarkable career, this is indispensable. Cameo guest appearance by Geraldo Rivera.

Family Grandstand and Family Sabbatical by Carol Ryrie Brink. Drudge Report siren! These charming 1950s children’s books, about the close-knit family of a university professor, are back in print thanks to the good graces of Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl. I’m reading them to my daughter now and they’re timeless.

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector. What a talent. I’m recommending this even though I’m pretty sure you will be left angry/baffled by at least every other story. I sure was.

Sneaky People by Thomas Berger. The Little Big Man guy, it turns out, wrote at least a dozen other very funny books, unknown outside his little cult. This was my first.

This week, I also wrote a short thing for Slate about Lee Se-dol, the Korean Go grandmaster who lost to Google’s “deep learning” algorithm AlphaGo. Welcome to the club, Mr. Lee!

With Nancy Reagan’s funeral last week and the most entertaining/existentially terrifying primary season in recent memory going on around us, I thought it was a good time for this Wordplay Wednesday.

Take the three uncontroversially greatest, most universally beloved presidents of modern times. That’s right, I’m talking about Nixon, Reagan, and Obama. Can you think of a common English word that has these three strings of letters, in consecutive order, hidden inside the word?

March 2, 2016

Take a common English word, and then advance its first letter one step later in the alphabet. (Like turning “rap” into “sap,” or “dither” into “either.”) These two words, in order, end one of the most famous TV ad slogans in history.

Advance the first letter yet again (“sap” into “tap”) and you’ll get a brand name that was also famously represented by the same star of the ad above.

What are the three words, and who’s the mystery celebrity?

Posted by Ken at 10:38 pm

February 9, 2016

I’m pleased to announce that the 500th installment of my weekly “Tuesday Trivia” quiz went out over the email last night. Five hundred weeks of free trivia, appearing in 16,000 inboxes every Tuesday morning without fail. I’ve wasted my life.

If you want to play next Tuesday, and for the next 500 Tuesdays, you can sign up in the sidebar at left. The quiz is free and we don’t sell or use your e-mail address for any other purpose. The seven questions usually have no theme at all, but today is an exception.

What author lived for thirty years on Cotchford Farm in Surrey, on the edge of the 500 Acre Wood?

Who had 500 euros sewn into his clothing when he was shot during Operation Neptune Spear?

In France, the “livre usuelle” is defined to be 500 of what SI units of measurement?

What was James Forrestal looking at on February 23, 1945, when he said to “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, “The raising of that…means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years”?

According to the chorus of the Proclaimers song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” how many miles would the singer be willing to walk to “fall down at your door”?

What current head coach is the only player in NBA history to shoot three-pointers above .500 in three different seasons?

February 8, 2016

Here’s a geography question if you have a few minutes to kill, and want to spend them thinking about geography for some reason.

The fifty U.S. states vary widely in area, obviously. Even if you list the states in descending order of area, there are some big gaps. The largest state, Alaska, has 2.2 times the land area of the runner-up, Texas. Texas, in turn, has 1.7 times the land area of #3, California.

But the biggest gap in the list comes further down, where two states are adjacent in the ordered-by-area list, even though one is a whopping 2.5 times bigger than the other. Even weirder, they’re real-life neighbors as well. (They share a border.)

What are these two states, which make up the biggest proportional gap in the otherwise fairly smooth curve of U.S. state areas?

Posted by Ken at 3:44 pm

February 2, 2016

I’m very happy to announce that the seventh Junior Genius book is available online and in bookstores today! The official Junior Genius Guides website has some preview pages to peruse and various retail links for when you decide just how many copies you want to buy. Ten? Twenty? It’s up to you. I’m sure you want the dinosaurs to know you love them, right?

This was a particularly fun book to write, because dinosaurs have so much built-in good will with kids, and because I think prehistoric life is pretty funny for some reason. For example, the new book has a running feature called “Ask a Trilobite” that, in hindsight, is probably way too silly for an “educational” book. But hey, they said Socrates was corrupting the youth too, and nothing bad ever happened to him!

Dinosaurs is also the last Junior Genius book for the foreseeable future, because I have two books to write for Scribner (an imprint for grown-ups!) and one of them is already late. So no more craft projects and no-bake snack ideas for me. My second childhood is over, back to the salt mines. I hope you enjoyed the detour.

Posted by Ken at 11:09 am

January 6, 2016

Happy new year, everyone! My resolutions for 2016 do not include blogging here more, but they do include wistfully looking back at a distant time when I didn’t really have a job and just the one vague writing deadline and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram didn’t exist and I posted something here every day. 2005! Good times! (I also weigh ten pounds more than I did then, which isn’t related to blogging frequency so much but does factor into my new year’s resolutions.)

Wordplay Wednesday! Take an adjective for something that’s very hard to kill. Reverse all its letters except the first one (as you would to turn TSETSE into TESTES) and you’ll get the name of a fictional adversary that was notoriously hard to kill. What are the two words?

Posted by Ken at 11:31 pm

December 7, 2015

Paul Bailey asked me a few months ago if I wanted to captain the U.S. team for the inaugural Quiz Olympiad, to be held in Athens next fall. I had a great time at the European Quiz Championships the one year I got to go, and TCONA is a blast every year. But this is something bigger! Olympian! I’m going into training immediately under the strict tutelage of a gruff Romanian coach who will hoist me onto his shoulders at the slightest pretext.

Full announcement here. I’m not sure if that subhed was really supposed to say “Insert clever Jeopardy! quip here” or if that’s an accidental placeholder, but it’s pretty funny either way.

Posted by Ken at 2:06 pm

December 3, 2015

A quick beginning-of-December reminder: I have ten books in print, each one better than the last! (Except for the one really disappointing one that stands out like a sore thumb. Not going to say which one.)

They are exactly the kind of light non-fiction sort of thing that makes an excellent holiday gift for hard-to-shop-for friends and family!

Some are for kids, othersforgrown–ups! Topics range from trivia to maps to parenting to Greek mythology! Basically those are the four main categories of book there are, so I wrote one for each of them.

Most importantly: if you would like a signed and/or personalized copy of one of these books for that special someone…I will make this happen for you!Contact my friends at Third Place Books, one of my favorite Seattle booksellers, and they’ll sell you a book and make me sign it the way you want, unless you wanted racial slurs or something.

Happy holidays!

Posted by Ken at 5:21 pm

November 19, 2015

I’m newly fascinated with the Skolt people of Lapland, and the (apparently well-accepted) idea among 20th-century sociologists that they were all telepaths! See this wire-service story from April 5, 1952, for example.

I feel like there’s a book in here somewhere, but this is the kind of thing that’s so great that I have no desire whatsoever to dig into it because I’m afraid actual facts will ruin the thing. I just want my mind-reading, caribou-herding northerners to be out there somewhere in the snow.

I first heard about Lapp ESP through a passing reference in Alan Fletcher’s design text/coffee table conversation piece/commonplace book The Art of Looking Sideways, which I can’t recommend highly enough.

Just now, I reopened Fletcher’s book at random, and found another great story: William Holman Hunt’s classic Pre-Raphaelite painting Il Dolce Far Niente depicts the body of his mistress and the face of his wife. (!!!)

But when you look it up online, the story isn’t as great as it sounds. The painting’s not a nude, for example. And Hunt wasn’t created a super-sexy wish fulfillment mash-up of his wife and lover (far niente in the streets, dolce in the sheets, as it were). It’s just that he started the portrait when he was engaged to one woman, and tweaked the face later because by the time he finished it, he was married to another.

Not quite as good, right? Stupid Internet. I wrote an article this week about the New Madrid earthquake, mentioning the old story about the church bells in Boston ringing a thousand miles away. A Twitter buddy corrected me: the story about the bells did appear in the Boston papers that week, but it was just a too-vaguely-phrased account of something that had actually happened in Charleston. Look too closely and all the great trivia evanesces away. But in the dark all women are beautiful.

Posted by Ken at 10:54 am

October 9, 2015

Good news, I’m releasing more endlessly repackaged material than George Lucas or the Beach Boys!

First up, there’s a new boxed set of the first three Junior Genius books (Maps and Geography, Greek Mythology, U.S. Presidents) available now at a discount price! It came out on Tuesday and actually I think I didn’t hear about it until a couple months ago.

ME: Is this just to get rid of extra stock of the early books?
EDITOR: Boxed sets actually do a few things! They attract readers who like to buy series together. They appeal to box stores who might not have stocked the individual books. (Aaaaaand also, they get rid of extra stock.)

If you never checked out the Junior Genius books, this is the way to go. (I linked to Amazon for the sake of convenience, but obviously you’re going to check out your local independent bookstore first if that is an option for you!)

And coming soon: I’m told Barnes & Noble will eventually be stocking a new jacketed edition of my Trivia Almanac from back in the day. When I heard about this deal, I asked if this was a chance to update errors in the text, and Random House said okay! So good news, there’s going to be a new printing of the Almanac with dozens of angry-reader-spotted errors corrected! (Yikes, I really need to update that page with the latest crop.)

While going through the almanac, I was shocked to discover (a) how unnecessarily hard it was in spots, and (b) how poorly some of the questions have aged. I fixed the second thing but not the first. Begone, questions about Cindy Sheehan, Footballers’ Wives, and Mystikal! Why were you there in the first place? There were probably a hundred or so questions whose answers were correct in 2007 but no longer (sports records that got broken, political terms that ended, Subway spokespeople who were disgraced, etc.) and those got fixed as well.

Please burn your old copies of the Almanac and rush to America’s last chain bookstore for your last chance ever at a (momentarily) up-to-date version!

You probably follow the Washington State Book Awards scene pretty closely, so you don’t need me to tell you this, but I’m one of three finalists for the Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award for Middle Readers.

One of the other nominees is the adorable comic strip Phoebe and Her Unicorn, so I assume I have no chance, but still. It’s nice to make state!

Posted by Ken at 10:25 am

September 15, 2015

For the first time in seven months, there’s a new Junior Genius Guide on bookstore shelves today! The Junior Genius introduction to Ancient Egypt costs just a few bucks and it’s jam-packed with cute illustrations and crazy trivia about the land of the pharaohs.

Did you know that, in ancient Egypt…

Kings were sometimes buried with their toilets?

Kids drank beer with every meal?

Sad pet owners would shave their eyebrows when a cat died?

You know who does know all that? Some kid. Some kid who paid like $7 for this book and is now way smarter than you. Do you really want that smarty-pants kid to know more about pyramids and stuff than you do?

I don’t have my author copies from Simon & Schuster yet, so I wandered over to a nearby bookstore owned by none other than my friend Tom Nissley of Jeopardy! fame. He let me buy a copy of my own book. Odds are, your local bookseller or Internet behemoth will allow you to do the same.

May the light of Ra smile down on you, Junior Genius readers!

Posted by Ken at 7:08 pm

September 10, 2015

For almost three years, I wrote a quiz for Parade magazine called “Kennections.” The format was simple: five not-too-tough trivia questions and one final gimmick: guessing what the five answers have in common. But last year the beloved Sunday supplement was bought out and jettisoned its editorial team and most of its regular features. Without a publisher, “Kennections” wasn’t a fun puzzle. It was just an annoying pun.

Earlier this year, mentalfloss.com offered to publish “Kennections” (and Parade was nice enough to hand over the trademark, which they had registered!) I love mental_floss (and even wrote a column in its newsprint version back in the day) and couldn’t think of a better home for the quiz.

Today, months later, the first quiz is finally live! I’m sorry about the long wait, but the time was spent getting the snappy new interface running right, as more of a Sporcle-style thing, and it is indeed very cool. Kennections 2.0 is truly interactive in a way it never was on Parade.com.

The plan is for new quizzes to appear on mentalfloss.com twice a week, just like in the Parade days. We are back!

Posted by Ken at 1:35 pm

September 1, 2015

Noooo, today’s “Tuesday Trivia” e-mail went out with an unfinished sentence. Luckily, the missing information was one of last week’s answers, not this week’s questions. So it was more of an unfortunate cliffhanger than a fatal glitch. Still, first time I’ve straight up omitted an answer in almost ten years.

The missing word in the answer to last week’s question 5 is “sperm.” Sorry I forgot to add the “sperm.” (For the record, the question concerned the type of whale that’s the world’s largest toothed animal.)

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